Force of nature.

I love Hayley Atwell’s performance as a south London cop in Life of Crime (10 May, 9pm) in every respect save for one: her accent. Do you know any coppers this posh? And no, before you ask, she is not supposed to be a Cambridge graduate on the fast track to the top of the Metropolitan Police (see Rupert Penry-Jones in Whitechapel). Her dad was also a policeman and her mum is London Irish, with the brogue to match. When we first meet her, she’s still living at home in a shabby terrace with a velour three-piece suite and a set of wine glasses that look like they came free with petrol. So quite where her immaculate RP came from, I don’t know. Even if she had unaccountably picked it up down her local comprehensive, you’d think she’d occasionally throw in the odd George Osborne-style glottal stop, given the company a copper keeps.

It bothered me a lot, this voice, but I kept watching because I really like the set-up of the series – it begins in 1985, when Denise Woods is a humble WPC in Brixton nick, and then follows her down the years (part two is set in 1997, by which time she is a DI; in part three it’s 2013 and she is a senior officer) – and also because Atwell is a captivatingly good actor when it comes to unspoken emotion. I believe in her character’s commitment to her work – her drive, determination and absolute refusal to allow the men to push her aside – in a way that I very much didn’t in the case of Emily Watson as an MP in The Politician’s Wife. It’s going to be fascinating to see how Atwell ages Denise; from what I read, she has done this with no help at all from wigs and stick-on wrinkles.

Anyway, 1985 . . . A girl has been murdered, but no one – by which I mean Denise’s male superiors – wants to know. Or at least, they would like to take the path of least resistance and hang it on the victim’s father, who has a temper. Denise, on the other hand, wants to know very much indeed. So determined is she to get her man, she might just be about to overstep the mark (I won’t say more, in case you’re saving it up). It’s true that Life of Crime is slightly underwritten (it’s by Declan Croghan, who also brought us episodes of Ripper Street and Waking the Dead); the dialogue is underpowered and lacks the fruity richness of, say, Life on Mars. It can be predictable. It was only a matter of minutes before a colleague had said to Woods: “Are you lesbian, or something?” But the plot is clever, dishing up an act of madness on her part that will have consequences even decades later, and I liked Con O’Neill’s performance as her boss, DI Ferguson, a man whose frayed exterior left you wondering whether he was a decent man masquerading as a ratbag, or a ratbag masquerading as a decent man.

In truth, though, episode one was worth watching for atmosphere alone. My God, the Eighties. For all that I was there, I still can’t get over them. How weird to remember that women constables were then expected to walk the streets in bulky skirts, sheer-ish tights and cross-body leather handbags (for all their make-up, presumably). Atwell and her co-star Richard Coyle, a detective who drives a brown Ford Capri, did some fantastic Eighties dancing at a nightclub called – I’m guessing at the spelling –Subotica, where the DJ looked exactly like Paul “It-took-me- 90-minutes-to-trim-these-sideburns” King. He played some Go West, which made me smile (most series would have had him spinning the Human League or Spandau Ballet), and when Woods asked him whether he knew the girl who had died, he replied that he had merely “got off with her” one night. Do people still say “got off with”? I’d love to know.

This isn’t Broadchurch, I see that, but it’s great to see yet another tough woman copper hijack prime time. Not so long ago, we had to make do with Jane Tennison. Now, though, they’re everywhere – and some of them even manage to have private lives, too.